The 'first' Whitlam government

Date: December 4 2012

J. R. Nethercote

December 2 this year marked four decades since Australians went to the polls for an election for the House of Representatives alone, which brought the Whitlam Labor government to office a few days later.

The Labor win was modest: Australia went from a Coalition government with a single-figure majority in the House to a Labor government with a similarly small margin over its opponents. The small majority was not, however, reflected in the speed with which the victors claimed the spoils. The triumphant prime minister-elect, Gough Whitlam, hit the ground running.

Flying to Canberra on the Sunday afternoon (December 3, 1972), he immediately closeted himself with some of the mightiest figures in the administration. Those summoned were the head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Sir John Bunting; Foreign Affairs secretary Sir Keith Waller; Attorney-General's secretary Clarrie Harders; and Public Service Board chairman Alan Cooley. As Whitlam wrote, ''barely 12 hours after the close of polling on December 2, the machinery for transfer of power was set in motion''.

Two days later, a similar but slightly enlarged cast gathered for a meeting that canvassed votes in the United Nations General Assembly, a proposal for Indian Ocean peace zone, Rhodesia and national service (conscription).

The conspicuous but telling exclusion of the Treasury secretary, Sir Frederick Wheeler, from these meetings indicated that neither economic policy nor questions concerning the financing of the new government's ambitious programs were active priorities in the minds of the new leadership. (A major briefing note for the incoming government took a decidedly dour view of economic prospects, which may explain but can hardly excuse the victors' reticence about economic policy.)

It soon became clear that several weeks might pass before it was possible for a new ministry to take office. Instead of following the usual practice of having the outgoing government remain in office on a caretaker basis, the prime minister-elect decided to take the reins immediately with a two-person government composed of himself and the deputy leader of the Labor Party, Lance Barnard.

This government, the first Whitlam government, held office from December 5 to 19. The two ministers were joined, for Executive Council purposes, by the governor-general himself, Sir Paul Hasluck, who was previously a senior minister in various Coalition governments.

The two-man government - the duumvirate, as it was known - went to work with a will. International affairs unsurprisingly figured prominently. Establishing diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China was under way by Wednesday, December 6, with talks in Paris; the Australian ambassador in Taiwan was recalled. Various measures against the illegal regime in Rhodesia were adopted; Australian-born communist journalist Wilfred Burchett was offered an Australian passport. The Afghanistan government was asked to bring to trial or release an Adelaide journalist jailed since early October.

It was also announced that the remaining Australian troops in Vietnam would be withdrawn within three weeks; another announcement related to ratifying international conventions on nuclear arms, racial discrimination and labour.

In addition to terminating national service, there was a range of activity on the domestic front. The equal pay case before the Arbitration Commission was reopened and Mary Gaudron was engaged as counsel for the Commonwealth. London-based lawyer Elizabeth Evatt was appointed to the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission; sales tax on contraceptives was removed and steps were taken to have them included in the National Health Scheme list; proposals concerning assistance for colour TV receivers were referred to the Tariff Board; and there were several measures relating to land rights for Aborigines.

Censorship of the novel Portnoy's Complaint was removed and an 'R' certificate applied; new grants of $4 million for the arts were announced. An honours list for January 1, 1973, was scrapped; recipients of top honours, appointment to the Privy Council, would have been Sir Percy Spender and a relatively recently appointed justice of the High Court, Sir Anthony Mason.

The Canberra Times' David Solomon wrote that younger voters (under 35s) would be most impressed by the government's first week in office. ''They are the ones most concerned about the cost of the pill, about racism, about doing away with British honours, about abolishing conscription, about recognising China.''

Amid all this decision-making, in the background, a high-level committee met almost daily to develop a new departmental machinery of government. This committee was partly composed of officials, principally from PM&C and the Public Service Board, and various staff, including Peter Wilenski from the nascent private offices of expected ministers.

Labor in opposition had had a certain amount to say about machinery of government - Whitlam especially targeted interdepartmental committees - and had foreshadowed new departments (e.g. Northern Development) or amalgamations (e.g. Defence, Transport).

But there was no general plan. In the last months of 1972, Wilenski, a former diplomat then with the Treasury, had a visiting fellowship at the Australian National University (to write about foot doctors in China). While on this assignment, he drew up a draft administrative arrangements order. This document formed the basis for further extensive work by the Public Service Board, which had already undertaken much research on its own initiative as soon as the election result was clear.

The consequent machinery of government, known at the time to be provisional, was 37 departments (a number even then slated for abolition). Some departments, such as PM&C, Foreign Affairs, Treasury and Attorney-General's, remained virtually untouched. Others were products of splits. Science was hived off from Education; Environment and Conservation became a department in its own right; John McEwen's old empire, Trade and Industry, emerged as separate departments of Overseas Trade and Secondary Industry; protection policy was assigned to PM&C in deference to the views of Tariff Board chairman Alf Rattigan; National Development emerged as Minerals and Energy on the one hand and Northern Development on the other; Interior was split three ways: Northern Territory, Capital Territory, and Services and Property. Significant foreshadowed amalgamations were Defence (combining Defence, Navy, Army, Air and parts of Supply); and Transport (composed of the departments of Civil Aviation and Shipping and Transport).

The Postmaster-General's Department was headed for what would now be called corporatisation (in the form of Telecom and Australia Post); the fate of External Territories was contingent on Papua New Guinea's path to self-government and independence - it eventually provided the nucleus for what is now AusAID. The only truly new department was Urban and Regional Development, the administrative expression of Labor's plans to rejuvenate Australia's cities.

Notwithstanding some important strengths, the new machinery of government - never intended to be permanent - had two weaknesses. For the time being, it was saddled with the ''one minister, one department'' rule. As had happened previously, this militated against consolidations. There was also a need to find some tiddler departments for ministers without particular aptitude for administration who were thrown up in the caucus elections.

These considerations meant a highly unstable departmental structure which, in the event, persisted for 15 years. The defect was not remedied until the new structure introduced in 1987 by the Hawke government. At once more innovatory and more durable, the Hawke structure was sustained for 20 years until disturbed by a return to tinkering under the Labor governments since 2007.

The Whitlam scheme immediately posed questions about the deployment of departmental heads. All but three were accommodated within the 37-department structure. Of the three displaced, one retired and two went to Geneva; of these two, one subsequently returned to head the Department of Construction during Malcolm Fraser's prime ministership.

There was a good deal of controversy behind the scenes. Some of the new ministers' acolytes were shocked that what they saw as the old guard remained in situ (an opinion now of greater interest given the breast-beating that followed prime minister John Howard's removal of half a dozen secretaries in 1996).

The initial batch of appointments included some new recruits from elsewhere, but it was only after the 1974 election that the government started looking elsewhere in earnest; as it happened, the main appointees were former private secretaries of Whitlam (John Menadue at PM&C; Wilenski at Labor and Immigration; and Jim Spigelman at Media). There was plenty of public controversy about these choices.

While the first Whitlam government was in office, journalist Bruce Juddery spent much time pondering the course of administration when the full ministry settled in. He was very doubtful about the Treasury, asking himself on one occasion ''if the Treasury could be trusted to implement the new government's policies''. Strangely, he placed much faith in Trade and Industry despite Whitlam's unconcealed hostility towards this bastion of McEwenism.

The Canberra Times, through an editorial, was among the first to call attention to the economy. On the Monday after the election, it said categorically: ''The new government's first and major problem will be the economy, which has been in the doldrums since about mid-1970.''

The role of Cassandra was played by Dr (now Sir David) Butler, the famous psephological seer from Nuffield College, Oxford. In ''The tragedy of gaining office'', an address to the Fabian Society in Victoria in late September 1972, excerpts of which The Canberra Times ran on the same Monday (December 4), he acknowledged that ''much effort has gone into the preparation for office'', but it was not of so distinctively a higher quality as to protect the new regime from ''disillusions''.

''I imagine that a Labor government's re-election in 1975 will depend far more on what happens to those two indicators, the cost-of-living index and the index of real wages, than on anything that may be done in the field of health or welfare or urban affairs, let alone abortion or the arts or the Aborigines. And I have no reason to believe that the Australian Labor Party has discovered a key to those intensely difficult problems of economic management that has been denied to treasurers and the politicians in the rest of the world.''

In a strangely pertinent aside, he warned: ''The first session of the new Parliament could see a field day for the rubbishing style of Australian politics.'' He also warned: ''Another hazard for the new government is the temptation to instant action.'' New ministers, he counselled, would be well-advised to read, observe and wait before making decisions.

Many years later, Menadue would write: ''With the benefit of hindsight, the Whitlam government … would have been better served if it had focussed on administrative arrangements: how to make the cabinet and the public service better coordinated and effective. Instead, there was a flurry of new policy decisions in those early heady days.

''A slower start would have been better. It sounds dull to focus on administrative arrangements but it would have minimised so many later problems. The new government was inexperienced and too impressed with the reputations of heads of departments who found change hard.''

The great student of Australian government and politics, Professor Geoffrey Sawer, had vivid memories of the euphoria surrounding the Scullin triumph of 1929 and had worked directly for H. V. ''Doc'' Evatt during the Curtin-Chifley years. He wrote from Cambridge: ''My wish for Gough and his government is that they should show a great deal more boldness and skill than Scullin, but that unlike Chif and Evatt they should pay some heed to the maxim: 'softly, softly, catchee monkey'.''

J. R. Nethercote is an adjunct professor with the Public Policy Institute at the Australian Catholic University.